“ … With Torn Sleep on His Face”. The Notes and Letters of Arved von Sternheim. Volume 2. The Years 1943 to 1945

With his monumental novel “ … With Torn Sleep on His Face”. The Notes and Letters of Arved von Sternheim. Volume 2. The Years 1943 to 1945, Normen Gangnus creates reality – not by rewriting history, but by bringing it to full effect through the detour of fiction.

The history of Nazi-looted art is incomplete. The traces of countless stolen works of art have been lost forever in the turmoil of the post-war period, in the bureaucracies of divided Germany, in the minds of those responsible who know about their whereabouts and destruction – at least apparently. Shortly after the publication of the letters of art dealer Arved von Sternheim, who disappeared under circumstances that remain unclear to this day, editor Normen Gangnus is given further records discovered by chance in the archives of the Ministry for State Security. These reveal not only the everyday life, longings, motivations, and reasons of a man who believed himself to be outside the events, but who, as Hermann Göring’s art collector, was directly entrusted with the “exploitation” of art classified as “degenerate”. Rather, they reveal a story of crime and loss, pitfalls and forgeries that extends into the present day and is so true that it requires Arved von Sternheim’s boundary-breaking literary invention to tell it.